April 5, 2008

Free internet directories are basically sites that list other website based on what category they fall under. It’s sometimes pretty hard to say which “general” catagories exist, because pretty much every free directory has it’s own set of categories – but you can pretty much imagine things like:

Entertainment

Education

Science

Religion

Bulgarian Sledge riding

Jewish clown skills

etc …

These websites are normally pretty fickle when they choose which sites they choose to list. By fickle, I mean that as long as you meet their requirements, they’ll link to just about friggin’ everything.

Now, why would you want to be linked on their site? Well, if you’re reading this blog I’m going to assume that questions doesn’t need answering. But there is a downside to this link-whoring, and one that isn’t always easy to spot: some of these directories are spam targets and don’t really care. You want to avoid these ones like the plague, otherwise you’re not going to be scoring any brownie points with any search engines. I’m not going to tell you how to spot these, because it’s not really a science, but just keep you’re eye out for spam linkage.

Directory requirements: what do they want?

Nothing, just your link

A link-back

MONEY!

Blood

Basically, unless you’re either a) rich or b) a link directory yourself or c) a vampire; you’re gunna want to go with the first requirement.

Now, how to do you go about finding these free directories? Well, luckily, someone has done all the work for us, namely: Info.Vilesilencer which has a list thats just beyond huge, it’s friggin’ massive.

So I found a huge list based on the first requirement and with my SudokuWorld.be link ready to be whored out I thought to myself: “hey cool, so I have the links to to loads of places that’ll link to me for free – lets go!”. And when I finished, it was about 10 hours later with 40 free directories done and no coffee left in the house anymore – thats right, it takes fucking ages to get these links in. Why?

All directories have different forms

All directory forms have different elements to fill in

Most of the directories I used had captchas so unreadable it took me 10+ times to get it right

Which 40 did I use? Well these (which I all hope are non-spammy and proberly reasonably popular):

Where + means that everything went ok and my link was submitted with no problem, and – means that as far as I could see, the link wasn’t submitted and ? means I don’t know what the fuck happened.

Some advice: during my attempts to whore out my links to these sites, I noticed some sililarities between all of these sites that might be useful for anyone else doing this kind of stuff:

Right a description of your site in some external program so you can copy & paste it into the form

Right your name and email address in the same program for each copy & pasting

On the directory, always first find the cateagory that matches your site, because almost all of these directory want you to submit from there

This helped me immensely, because typing that stuff 40 times would be the same as peeling potatoes using a toothbrush – boring.

So did they bring in any traffic?

I submitted to the first 40 sites about 2 weeks ago and the amount of traffic I have received from them combined: almost close to 0 hits. Which is pretty dam disappointing to be honest, especially after all the jumping through loops I had to do to get my site listed.

But 2 weeks is like 2 seconds in the world of SEO linking, so I’m going to have to wait and see on this one. But if you want my advice as of right now: don’t bother with the free linking directories – bother with specialized directories and more reputable ones, which I will try and blog about some other time, as this is where the hits really come from (at least for me they do).